Late Night Romps

Gleefully slashing to pieces the conception of film festivals as showcases for austere arthouse, Late Night Romps provide suspense-filled, blood-soaked entertainment for horror and thriller enthusiasts with films this year hailing from France, Spain, South Korea and the US.

Based on actual events, Them is a nerve-shredding thriller about a professional French couple (Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen) whose isolated house in the Romanian woods is assailed by a terrifying, unknown force. Also from France, Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan (19 Aug) is a lurid, extreme blend of sex, violence and offbeat humour as the alluring Eve (Roxane Mesquida) invites three unwitting male friends to her house in the country.

The EIFF’s twin passions for both South Korean filmmaking and director Michael Powell are celebrated in Kim Yong-gyun’s sophomore film Bunhongsin (Red Shoes) (18 Aug) " a stunningly shot and wickedly subversive reconfiguration of the Technicolor masterpiece.

From the US and Spain come two killer thrillers The Prodigy (25/26 Aug) and H6: Diary of an Assassin (24/25 Aug). The former is a gangster/slasher hybrid heavily indebted to 70s American cinema. The latter is an assured, extreme debut from 23 year-old Martin Garrido Baron in which a murderer emerges from a long prison sentence to resume his killing spree. Be very afraid. (Pasquale Iannone)